2014 Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show!
My favorite events to shoot are events that people don’t expect me to shoot, like One Direction or Comic Con. I also love shooting weird sporting events like the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest or the Indy 500 Snakepit or the Kentucky Derby infield. (Not that the Derby or the 500 are weird, but the parties inside the track are!) And of course I love photographing adorable animals, cause everybody loves photographing adorable animals, I mean that’s Instagram’s entire business model. So when I emailed my editor at the Village Voice and asked him if I could shoot the 2014 Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show I think he was a bit surprised, but I really couldn’t think of a more perfect event to shoot.
Going in I didn’t know anything about dog shows that I didn’t learn from the movie Best In Show and after spending hours at the WKC Dog show I still have no idea what the hell is going on. As far as I can tell on Monday and Tuesday during the day they select the Best of Breed winners over at the Pier’s on 12th ave at 55th street, from there all the Best of Breed winners go to Madison Square Garden at night to compete in their respective groups. The groups consist of Terriers, Sporting Dogs, Working Dogs, Non Sporting Dogs, Toys, Hounds and Herding Dogs. Then on Tuesday night the seven winners of the groups battle for Best In Show.
The judges look at their teeth and their coats and then they run around in a line and then run around in a circle or something. I am sure they have some sort of system for judging but I don’t have a clue how it works. They should probably just vote for the most fun to play with or the cutest but I am pretty sure it doesn’t work like that. If I had a vote this dog would win ever year. In the end a wire fox terrier named “Afterall Painting The Sky” won. He was pretty cute but I was rooting for a giant bloodhound named Nathan. That dude ruled.
Anyway, I only shot on Tuesday, I spent about an hour at the piers and then I was at MSG all night. Even though I only covered about a fourth of the event I still shot nearly 1500 photos which I edited down to about 300 fucking adorable photos that you MUST look at or you are a soulless bastard. Holy shit these dogs are cute.
